I fully suspect this may be an unanswerable question, but I figured I'd float it anyway. Among the real good artists here who are not fully professional, what are the standard rates for a large project involving multiple sprites, tiles, and so forth? I'm toying with the idea of taking a stab at a Metroid clone type thing and am trying to ballpark what the budget is likely to be (i.e., thousands, tens of thousands, etc.).
Assume that someone else would do concept art and general color schemes. Also, it might be possible to have 3D animated silhouettes that could be "overpainted" (overpixeled?). Finally, assume that we're talking 800x600 resolution.
As I said, I imagine this is a tough question to answer, so maybe the easier question is what the cost of each animated sprite would be, or something of the sort.
I know that it's not uncommon to use hourly rates, rather than milestone rates, but because this would likely be coordinated over the Internet and I think incentives align better when you're paid by the job pending approval by the buyer (from my own experience), I would probably use a flat system.
To the extent this would feature into the calculus, this would be a PC-based, freeware or low-cost game. No royalty arrangement would be used because in my experience those offering royalties tend not to finish their projects. All rights would reside with the developer, which would be a corporation in either the LLC or S-corp form. Finally, and most irrelevantly, my own experience is that I've worked extensively as a freelance story-writer in the game industry on one AAA title (an upcoming Bioware RPG) and a number of AA titles (which I define as commercial projects sold in stores that are not made by major developers). By trade I'm a lawyer, and I've been quite successful thus far, though I'm just getting launched in a career.
Anyway, this is all still at the pipe-dreamy stage, I just want to figure out whether it's outside my financial ability to do a game this way. Thanks!
